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Commercial children's pgrams' heauy reliance on perceptual "hype" assumes that the child Oiesoer's attention must be captured and held by constant action, change, noise, and oisual onslaught.Television is unique in its form rather than its content. The medium of television involves production techniques that provide specific visual and auditory means of representing content. We refer to these properties as the f m l features of television. Formal features can, in principle, be used to convey any content, although they may be correlated with particular types of content as a consequence of production conventions and decisions.Although the line between form and content is sometimes blurred, the two can be usefully distinguished conceptually. Forms of television are those attributes which can be described as applying to a wide range of program types, content themes, story plots, and narrative structures. For example, the presence or absence of dialogue is a form of television, but what is said is content. Similarly, by our definition, the amount of physical action or movement is a form that can characterize almost any program, but what is done (e.g., hitting, kissing, jumping) is content which is relevant to the message or story.Beginning with McLuhan (lo), a number of theorists have proposed that the unique forms of television lead people to experience and process information in

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